Thousands Play in Oakland’s Streets at the First-Ever ‘Oaklavia’ fromStreetfilms on Vimeo.
On October 2, Oakland will hold an event called Oaklavia, closing a few miles of roads to cars to let people experience car-free city streets. Today’s video is the community reaction to the first time Walk Oakland Bike Oakland organized Oaklavia, last year.
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You can learn more about Oaklavia at its website, oaklavia.org, or at walkoaklandbikeoakland.org.
See you there?
Noelle and I had fun at Pecha Kucha in San Francisco at the SPUR Urban Center on June 21. For those unfamiliar with the Pecha Kucha format, each speaker has 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. The format makes for a fun but focused look at what a wide range of professionals is working on and thinking about. Presentations are loosely organized around a theme. The theme this time was “Denser.”
Using my notes, I am putting together a set of posts that lists the presenters in order, along with links to their website (if I could find them) and any major thoughts I jotted down. For some presentations, I took a number of notes. Other presentations have fewer notes (maybe I was looking at the images more carefully?). All of the presentations were more interesting and beautiful than revealed by my notes and these posts.
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Julie Kim – Hot Studio
essay – “Why We Lie to Kids” – Paul Graham
suburban existence – capsule to capsule
organized chaos – systems for sharing space in dense areas
suburban promise – control enables freedom
2 symbols – house + car
urban reality – loss of control enables freedom
worlds colliding in “meatspace”, the real, physical, non-virtual world
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David Baker – Architect – David Baker + Partners Architects
crowded
hot & dirty
green
looking at density per square mile and the carbon footprint per person
Portland Pearl District full of 300 x 300 blocks
poem – “Lines in Potentis” – Ben Okri
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Gabriel Tan – Out of Stock Design, Singapore
members of the firm are from different countries, but find a way to work together online
umbrellas in internal gutter to drain
mix of handcrafts and mass production
very focused on flatpack furniture
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Antonio Roman-Alcalá – SF Urban Agriculture Alliance and Alemany Farm
“The Political Economy of Urban Land, and Its Relation to an Urban Agricultural Future”
farming and cities have co-evolved
our population is no longer “mostly farmers” – not directly tied to the land
what society values – highest-earning college majors vs lowest-earning college majors
can’t urban plan our way out of mining and destruction of rainforests
17th & Folsom = “future park” – park for kinds + urban garden
who gets to decide the best use of the land? the owner of the land or the community?
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Part 1 is posted here. Part 2 is posted here.
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Are suburban corporate campuses falling out of fashion? NRDC staff blog predicts an increase in smart growth. Lonely Planet surveyed travelers to find a list of the top 20 walking cities. Grist readers nominated 10 additional cities that didn’t make the original Lonely Planet list. A study commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations finds that roughly one third of the food produced for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted.
Curitiba Brazil has a number of innovative waste management programs. Follow this link to view a short video that features Curitiba’s Green Exchange Program. The program operates by exchanging fresh food for recyclable items that residents collect and bring to a transfer station.
Also see information here on the documentary A Convenient Truth, a film that chronicles how this typical South American city is transforming itself through innovative, sustainable community initiatives. Curitiba’s ideas and expertise are being exported to other cities around the world. I haven’t seen the doc yet, but it appears to be worth a look.
Zero Resource 